From hurt to forgiveness
Emotionally Triggering: This article contains mentions of acts of violence and represents a group discussion that explored the relationship between anger, grief, and forgiveness. It is a convergence of collective streams of consciousness and strives to be respectful of the reader and Aekya’s March Roundtable participants. Please refrain from reading if you are mentally exhausted and pondering why the world is a shithole.
Let’s catch the train of thought in an attempt to dissect forgiveness — press play before reading the article.
The moment you are living right now, after opening your eyes, is where this month’s call was situated. It was a deconstruction of acts of violence, their relationship to forgiveness, and what it would take to forgive someone. You may have felt rage in both the scenarios we just retraced, but our emotions are more tangible when directing them towards a personal experience. Although, when we witness a mass murderer kill innocent individuals, the pain is beyond the weight of grief and includes guilt, failure, and all our emotions that inform us of our societal shortcomings. When we started this month’s roundtable, we got the opportunity to learn that the core of Jainism is forgiveness. Now, we didn’t know we would find ourselves depleted of forgiveness at this moment of the discussion. When asked, can the anger and grief we collectively feel towards the man who killed six Asian women in Atlanta turn into forgiveness? We all expressed that we probably don’t have what it takes to forgive the murderer.
What does it take to forgive the system that continually allows toxic white supremacy and masculinity to flourish and construct the cruel world we inhabit? During our roundtable, we all started acknowledging how it may not be possible to forgive the Atlanta Mass Murderer, which we later realized wasn’t about forgiving him. Still, it was more cathartic to understand the relation to our grief in this instance. The roundtable participants weren’t just enraged by the act of violence; we felt wronged that we are a part of the society that continually devalues us — as women of color. Since I’ve spent so many words explaining how and why we cannot forgive the societal norms and beliefs for being outdated, I need to explain why it is easier to forgive an individual. The theory banality of evil, termed by Arendt, suggests that sin does not have a criminal appearance. Instead, evil perpetuates when immoral principles become normalized over time by unthinking people. Everyday life becomes a reflection of evil, where our complacency is an act of violence. Most often, the heaviness of this banality of evil makes us live in continual grief with no hope of forgiving a mass murderer. Because it wasn’t just him, it was all of you and us who contributed to the act with our complacency.
Jain Philosophy proposes anger to be a symptom of the erosion of forgiveness. For a long-lasting solution, one needs to cultivate forgiveness as the core forte and not merely use it to treat the symptoms.
Empathy is a magical thing — sometimes you feel the pain of an animal and sometimes live through other humans’ pain. More importantly, the pain increases when you see someone who looks like you — the color of their skin, their race, and economic strata — undergo pain. We feel the pain on the victim’s behalf. While we feel exhausted from the grief, anger, and fear, we also are inept at understanding the depth of these emotions. At times, we extend our empathy even towards individuals who may have been the cause of our trauma, by attaching a face, soul, and potential humanity to them; and that is where we realized how, comparatively, easy it may be to forgive a person instead of systemic force. Sharing stories of acts of violence, we started collecting anecdotes where the families have forgiven murderers and cared for them. Still, the collective consciousness is unable to overcome the loss of humanity.
Since we hardly leave any stones unturned, we also discussed how different justice systems and individuals have come to expand the horizon of murders, shooters, and terrorists — addressing trauma and offering psychological rehabilitation. Does the journey of a crime come to an end with a perpetrator’s imprisonment? Ideally, — the roundtable participants agreed — it should come from the perpetrator’s quest for forgiveness after acknowledging their actions. It is not easy to forgive someone who has inflicted pain on you and everyone you know in the world, and we may be unable to find essential ingredients to forgiveness. Towards the end, we realized that the journey to forgiveness starts from understanding who we are trying to forgive — ourselves for being complicit, the instigator for inflicting pain and trauma, or the systemic inequity. We may not be ready to forgive just yet, I feel we were looking ahead to question why we may forgive ourselves, you, and everyone out there.
While this month’s call was cathartic and organic, it was also one where we did not have enough answers or time. After encountering our demons for 90 mins, we decided to leave with the feeling of catharsis and a question.
Where do forgiveness and justice intersect?
